I'm So Sick Of Being Lonely
by Galaxy-Defending-Hopeful
Summary: Tom puts an ad in a lonely hearts column asking for friendship and musical ability, Danny answers. AKA How Tom and Danny really met. Mild Flones (not ship centric), mild swearing, kissing, cuteness, oneshot.


**Um, yes! Mild Flones, mostly friendship oneshot. Pretty cute. Mild swearing, perviness (of course!) and general sweetness. Basically, my friend said to me 'What if Tom and Danny actually met on the internet instead of at the V auditions?' and I jumped off and thought of this. Also, the bit about Tom getting caught watching porn is true! It came from a 2004 interview with some magazine (I only have the McFly pages, a friend gave them to me). The literal transcription is, '****_...Tom's mum once caught him red-handed looking at naughty pictures!'._**

* * *

'_Male, 18, seeks male aged 16 – 25 for music playing, friendship and fun, maybe more. Blonde, brown eyes, one dimple.'_

Danny's eye was caught as he glanced over the lonely hearts ads. Most were kind of hilarious (for example, _'Female, 84 but young at heart, seeks male, 18 – 20, for sex and nothing else. I'm a gilf!'_) but this one seemed cute. Sure, he may only be seventeen himself. This man has said sixteen or above though. Danny was lonely. There was no way around it. He hadn't really had many girlfriends or boyfriends, just a couple, and he hadn't been particularly happy in those relationships. It'd been pretty dreadful, actually: awkwardly holding hands in publicly, making out in random corridors at school and sex which he assumed must have been crap because he didn't enjoy it. To be fair, he'd only had sex with one girl, so he couldn't really tell whether it was bad or he just had extremely high standards. Danny re-read the advert, trying to decide whether to call. Two small words kept on pulling him back. 'Music playing'. He thought of his beautiful guitar sat up in his bedroom, and the small pile of songs he had written. Affirmed, he typed the numbers in.

* * *

"Hello?"

"Hello! Is this male, eighteen?" Danny asked cheerfully down the phone. The voice laughed.

"Yes, hi! I'm Tom. What's your name?"

"Danny. I'm responding to your ad." he mentally punched himself. If he'd asked if it was 'male, eighteen', of _course _he was. "Obviously."

"Good to hear from you! No one else has responded!" Tom laughed again, a warm, infectious laugh which made Danny laugh as well. "Um, when do you want to meet?"

"I can meet on Saturday, if you want." Danny offered.

"Of course! I'll come to you, if you want. I live in London, so it's easy for me to travel." Tom's voice was so pleasant that Danny found himself offering up his address.

"I'll be wearing black jeans and a blue T-shirt." Danny said. "And I have straightened brown hair and freckles."

"You already know what I look like!" Tom teased down the phone. "But I'll be wearing a The Who t-shirt-"

"You like The Who?!" Danny interrupted excitedly.

"Yeah! My favourite of theirs is Pinball Wizard."

"Me too! Anyway, I'll be in that t-shirt and blue jeans. I'm fairly short for a bloke, but I'm not exactly skinny! Oh, and bring your guitar along!"

As they said goodbye, Danny grinned. He had a date (well, sort of) with a blonde boy he had never met before. Life was looking up.

* * *

Tom nervously twiddled his thumbs as he sat in the arranged café, his guitar at his feet and a mug of tea on the table. Bolton was nice enough, and his family hadn't asked too many questions about where he was going. Probably, they assumed he was going to film the auditions like he said he was. James had been annoyed that he wasn't going, but when Tom said tentatively that he was going on a date, he immediately began to rib him about it. By the end of the phonecall, Tom was in tears of laughter. He glanced up at the sound of a bell in the door ringing, and saw an attractive, skinny boy with straightened brown hair, huge blue eyes as clear as water and a smile as sweet as the doughnut that he had already wolfed down.

"Danny?"

Danny glanced at him, then grinned, looking relieved. He gave a little wave, ordered two mugs of tea and two kit-kats and then sat down at Tom's table.

"Good to meet you!" Danny smiled. Then he glanced at the mug of tea in front of Tom and laughed. "I just ordered you a tea. Oh man, I'm a twat."

Tom shrugged. "It's almost finished – thank you for getting me a tea!"

The tea and kid-kats arrived, and for a moment they were distracted. Tom felt slightly uncomfortable, as did Danny. What were they meant to talk about?

"Nice guitar." Tom finally managed to say.

"Ah, I bought it with drug money I found on a bus a couple of years ago." Danny replied. Tom was instantly aware that they had had very different childhoods. If this guy had found drug money on a bus and used it to buy a guitar, he was instantly alien to Tom. Tom couldn't help feeling attracted to the guy, however: he had a kind of effortless charm about him that attracted Tom like a moth to a flame.

"What do you play?"

"Mostly rock. My favourite to play is Bittersweet Symphony by The Verve." Danny muttered, twiddling with his kitkat and spraying crumbs across the table.

"Awesome! I mostly play pop, but I guess that's to be expected." Tom laughed, before forgetting that he had neglected to tell Danny anything about why it would be expected. Sure enough, Danny asked in a confused voice,

"Why would it be expected?"

"Oh, I...um...I do a bit of songwriting with James Bourne."

It took a second for the name to click in Danny's head. When it did, his mouth fell open. "James from _Busted?_" he asked, utterly astounded.

"Um...yeah..."

"Like, you _hang out _with him?"

"Yeah."

"What songs of theirs have you helped write?" Danny suddenly demanded.

"Not really any on the first album – they were mostly written before I came along. I've had co-write on most of the songs on their upcoming album, though." Tom smiled at how completely shocked Danny was.

"I was gonna ask if you wanted to hear one of my songs, but it'll be crap compared to yours!" grinned Danny good-naturedly.

The barrier was broken: soon they began to chat as they had never chatted before.

* * *

After a few weeks of irregular meeting stunted by Tom's train times, they decided that Tom would introduce Danny to the management and suggest that they wrote songs together. Danny was an absolutely amazing guitar player, and was a pretty good song writer as well. When they were with each other, an easy flow of conversation and ideas passed between them. Fletch and Rashman listened to Danny play a few songs he had written (Tom noted that they didn't rip them apart verbally like they had his first songs) and then nodded. Fletch said,

"Tom, I think you might have actually found someone with talent."

Tom and Danny had been staying at the InterContinental Hotel, writing songs, staying up all night and having a good time, for a week when it happened. In the middle of playing a song, Tom had suddenly put his guitar down and said,

"We should have some fun."

Danny nodded. "What d'ya mean? Like, drinking?"

Danny had unsuccessfully tried to get them drinks at every bar and pub around. He had, however, managed to sneak several beers out of Rashman, one of their manager's, fridge when they visited his room. They had shared these over a period of several days, but they had run out.

"No, like, hanging out. We could get James in. Watch a movie, eat some crap, play spin the bottle with some girls. Whatever."

Danny was surprised to hear Tom mention girls: usually, he only mentioned one specific girl, a lady named Giovanna that Danny figured had to be incredibly lucky.

"Cool. You get James – give me five minutes, and I'll have some girls."

* * *

True to Danny's word, he brought back three girls who looked about nineteen or twenty within five minutes. Tom had absolutely no idea how he'd done it. James arrived promptly, however, and they began to play truth or dare. One of the girls turned to Tom and asked,

"Do you watch gay or straight porn?"

Tom flushed. For some reason, all he could think about was the time when he was about fifteen when his mum had walked in on him watching porn. "Straight."

The girl laughed. "That's a shame, because you and Danny seem totally gay together."

Everyone laughed, and Danny jokingly reached across to where Tom was lying on his stomach on one of the beds and slapped his arse. Everyone laughed harder, and Tom was incredibly glad his boner was covered.

The game continued, until they got bored and decided to play spin the bottle. It first landed on Tom, and he smiled, hoping that it would land on someone good. It spun...and slowly landed on Danny. He grinned, indicated that Tom should stand up, and pulled him in for a sloppy kiss. At that moment, Tom felt his attraction to Danny fall away. The realisation hit him: he and Danny should never be together. Their friendship was so amazing that it should never happen.

* * *

Of course, when Danny won an award for 'Most Snoggable Male' two years later, Tom was quick to refute it, though he never told them exactly how he knew.


End file.
